The Fourteenth Doctor
by bookEnd
Summary: Four companions are pulled from their timelines. The Fourteenth Doctor needs their help to stop the disaster that violated time and space and led to his continued existence.
1. Bleeding Timelines

Disclaimer: I keep forgetting to put these on. I think my denial has reached an all-time high. I don't own Doctor Who and I make no money from any of my writing.

Rose did a double-take and turned to the Doctor.

"Doctor, I swear that woman who just went past was wearing a cardigan!"

"Hmm?" the Doctor said absently. "Don't be silly, Rose. Cardigans aren't invented as such for a few centuries."

"An _orange_ one," Rose added.

If the Doctor had been paying attention, he might have been slightly more worried.

xxx

"Doctor, did you see that couple?"

"What couple?"

"The couple that just walked past. Holding hands."

The Doctor looked blank. "Nobody walked past."

"I saw them! They looked like something out of the fifties or sixties! This is Victorian London, isn't it?"

"Of course it is." The Doctor span around. "I don't see anyone."

Rose stared down the road. There was no way they could have reached the corner in that time.

xxx

"What does he think he looks like?" Rose whispered as the man with the appalling multi-coloured coat walked past.

"Who?"

"You can't have missed him! Big bloke, curly blond hair, _ghastly_ dress sense."

The Doctor looked at Rose strangely and decided to spare himself the embarrassment.

xxx

They had managed 1979 this time. The Doctor was at his most hyperactive, jumping around and running ahead while Rose laughed beside him. They were getting some strange looks from passer-bys. But not from the girl walking straight towards them. She didn't seem to be looking at them at all. Her face seemed somewhat familiar. Rose racked her brains. The answer came just after she had walked past.

"I know you! Wait! Sarah, wait!"

The Doctor watched in utter confusion as his companion shouted at thin air. She started running and the Doctor was about to call after her when she simply vanished.


	2. The Gathering

Disclaimer: I really hope that the lawyers have not taken advantage of my forgetfulness. Let me state clearly: I do not own Doctor Who. Doctor Who and all associated characters and concepts belong to the BBC.

Rose kept on running, although the girl disappeared from in front of her, even though it grew dark and cold, even though her Tardis key was burning with a painful freezing heat. To stop moving was to die; she knew it as well as she knew her own name. Then she was through, breathing heavily. Although she knew that she had only run a few yards, she also knew that she had travelled a vast distance.

The streets of 20th century Sheffield had vanished. Instead a grey desert stretched ahead, distances blurred by some kind of fog, illuminated by a watery moon. Rose glanced behind her and saw only more desert. As she turned in a circle, looking for some indication of life, a flash of colour caught her eye. A blob of blue sat near the horizon. With a lack of anything else to do, Rose set out.

xxx

Rose stumbled yet again, the sand slipping and sliding under her feet. She cursed under her breath and picked herself up, wincing as the sharp grains cut into her hands. She seemed to have been repeating this cycle for hours and yet the blob seemed no nearer.

"Rose?" There was a shape approaching.

"Sarah."

"How did you get here?"

"I followed you. A younger you. What about you?"

"I followed the Doctor."

"Which Doctor?"

"I- I don't know." It was true. When she tried to imagine _the_ Doctor, all she got was a vague impression. If she tried to pin a face to it, the features slid. Grey hair with a boyish face, bright blue eyes darkened into chocolate brown. She had to think of something specific such as 'My first Doctor' 'the Doctor with the scarf' 'or 'Doctor-with-Rose.'

"Have you got any idea what's happening?" After all, Rose was the one still travelling with the Doctor.

Rose shook her head. "I was heading for that blue blob. I thought it might be a Tardis."

"Me too."

They walked together in silence for a while.

"Rose? If this turns out to be the Doctor's fault, do me a favour."

"What?"

"Kill him for me. I hate having my memory tampered with."

At Rose's surprised look, she explained. "I think something like this has happened before. I think I met the Third again. But I can't remember."

"How do you know I'll remember?"

Sarah Jane shrugged. "Tegan remembered that particular episode."

"Tegan?"

"She was one of the Doctor's companions at the time."

"Oh." Rose knew that she knew very little of the Doctor's past. She wished that Sarah would stop mentioning it, intentionally or not.

"How do you know her?"

"The Doctor has a certain _fondness_ for humans from around our time. There's a group of us, we meet up ever so often, have a coffee. You'd be welcome any time."

Rose opened her mouth to make a reply- what she was going to say she had no idea- but was interrupted by a voice.

"Hello, Sarah. Hello, Rose."

At the same instant the strange fog seemed to clear, allowing Rose and Sarah to see the man who had spoken, the Tardis behind him, and the couple stumbling in from the other side.

Rose gave a gasp of surprise. "I saw you in Victorian London! You were wearing exactly the same clothes."

The woman looked around. "Where are we?"

"I don't know, Barbara."

"One minute we were in nineties London and now…"

"Ian, Barbara, this is Rose and Sarah." The man was grinning widely.

"Who are you?" the man called Ian demanded.

"I'm the Doctor."

"No, you're not." Ian and Barbara chorused at the same time Rose and Sarah simultaneously demanded 'Which one?"

He turned to Ian and Barbara first. "Yes, I am. But I shouldn't be."

Turning to Rose and Sarah, he stated simply, "The fourteenth."


	3. The Fourteenth Doctor

Disclaimer: I know I have been forgetting to put disclaimers on recently. To contradict any notions you may conceived due to this, I don't own Doctor Who and make no money from this.

"You can't be." Rose stared at the man in shock. The Tenth Doctor had explained the concept to her, told her that he could regenerate twelve times, have thirteen bodies, told her this was his tenth.

"Oh, I can be. I can be and I am. But I _shouldn't_ be."

"How?"

"Something terrible has happened. Something that has violated the very fabric of the universe. The ripples are spreading out through time and space as we speak. The foundations have gone; it's only a matter of…time before everything collapses."

"Why do you need us?" Sarah interrupted.

The Doctor looked genuinely surprised. "To fix things, of course."

They all looked fairly stunned. Something had violated the very fabric of the universe and he made it sound so easy.

"You are all humans, your lives have crossed a millennium boundary, and you travelled with my Pentaler incarnations, that is One, Five and Ten."

"Your memory must be going in your old age, Doctor. I never travelled with your fifth incarnation." Sarah had just been starting to live a life of her own, had finally stopped waiting for him, and he dragged her back.

"You're the nearest after Tegan. And my memory is not going. Whatever state my _body_-" he gave a short bitter laugh "-is in, my mind is not fractured. I remember quite clearly that she told me she never wanted to see any of my faces again."

"How do you know that something has happened?"

Humans were always so inquisitive. "I can feel it, Barbara. I know it. I know myself. And I am wrong. The universe is wounded and I am…_festering_." The last word was spat out with venom.

"Maybe you've regenerated again because…I don't know. Something to do with the Time Lords being gone?" Rose suggested.

"Do you have any proof?"

"Oh, you always were one for proof, Chesterton. You want actual physical proof?"

He pulled a ring from his finger and held in the palm of his hand.

"That's the Doctor's ring!"

The Doctor agreed. "I modified it." He dropped it at his feet.

They all took a step back. Barbara gasped and Ian wrapped a protective arm around her.

"Are you satisfied?" His voice had changed too. Every syllable was spoken in a different voice; but sounded overall harsh and grating.

"Gallifreyan DNA simply doesn't provide for a fourteenth body. Once a particular pattern of DNA is used, it can't be used again."

The Ninth's Doctor blue eye gazed at Rose; the Fourth Doctor's blue eye, situated an inch lower, gazed at Sarah. The face surrounding the eyes was a hotchpotch of different skin tones, alternating sagging and stretching as both the skin and the bone underneath it changed. Tufts, strands, spikes and curls of brown, blond, grey, black, white, and ginger hair failed to hide the mismatched ears, both the nose and the mouth were horribly lopsided and distorted, and when he spoke, they could see the uneven assortment of teeth inside.

One of his shoes had a very thick sole, to compensate for the fact that that leg was a few inches shorter, as was one arm. As he bent down to pick up the ring, they noticed that every finger on his patchwork hands had quite clearly come from a different hand. Then he was hidden from view once more, by the illusion projected by the ring when it touched his skin.

"Oh God." Rose breathed.

"Doctor…you're…" Sarah trailed off.

"A monster." the Doctor supplied flatly. "The original Frankenstein's monster."

"But Doctor…how could you- how could things end like this?"

The Doctor smiled grimly. "End? My dear Barbara, things are only just beginning."

A/N: Sorry for the really, really short chapter. They will hopefully get longer later. To any readers of Torn reading this, I have not abandoned it. I will update, I'm just reluctant to end it.


	4. Missions

Disclaimer: Having to repeat this so many times in a short space of time is very bad for my state of denial. Here goes: I don't own Doctor Who or anything associated with it and I make no money from using the BBC's property.

A/N: Sorry for the delay in updating! I have been otherwise occupied. But now, with all commitments fulfilled (except for the persistent nuisance known as homework) I can write this chapter! I have been asked for placements, so I will say that for Rose, it is between Fear Her and Army of Ghosts. For Sarah, it is set after School Reunion, and don't even ask about the spin-offs and for Ian and Barbara, it is set during the second series, between The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Rescue so no Susan or Vicki. Well, that was a long note…

"What can we do?" Rose broke the silence.

The others seemed to shake themselves. There was something deeply _wrong_ about the Doctor having to live on as such an abomination. It seemed, somehow, to rob him of his dignity. That was it. The Doctor had always had dignity.

"Is this where we discover why our species and native time are important?"

The look of discomfort on the Doctor's illusion of a face was so fleeting that they all wondered whether they had imagined it.

"I have pinpointed several points in history that seem to have contributed to this. I need you to visit these events." He drew four devices from his pocket.

Ian stared at them with a small frown creasing his forehead. "Is it just me or do they look rather like those travel devices we had on Marinus? What do you think, Barbara?"

"I think they do."

"They are similar. But these allow you to travel in time as well as space and also have nexus point locators. That is, they will detect any deviations from the timeline that is programmed and alert you, and me."

He explained slowly and patiently. But it didn't make any more sense than if he had explained at ninety miles an hour.

"So if it's just a simple find and fix-it mission, why can't you do it?"

"I daren't," he replied soberly. "I'm not supposed to exist. That's why I'm here, where the TARDIS and I can do the least damage. If I try to interfere directly… I had a friend, once, who nearly ceased to exist because her family history was changed. When I brought her to the nexus point, she actually began to fade in and out of time. I had to-"

The Doctor had never been so willing to volunteer information, but they couldn't shake the feeling that he had gone off on a deliberate tangent, as if to distract them.

"So what do we have to do? Why is our species and native time important? Or travelling with your…Pentaler incarnations?"

Sarah gave him the look that said "I'm a journalist, it's my job to ask questions. Now answer me."

The Doctor was saved by Rose. "The TARDIS?"

The look of pain that crossed his face was not imagined. "You don't want to see."

He changed the subject again by handing out the travel dials. This Doctor seemed remarkably good at deflecting interest, Sarah observed. She wouldn't let him get away with it. She was just about to ask another awkward question when Rose interrupted.

"Doctor, what's happening for the other Doctor? I mean, the one I'm travelling with? Will he have to tell Mum that I disappeared? I can't even phone her and explain." Rose pulled her mobile from her pocket and stared dejectedly at it. "That's the second time we've been out of range."

"That's a phone?" Ian exclaimed, amazed.

"About forty years in your future," the Doctor explained.

"How does it work? On some sort of radio waves?"

"Something along those lines. But I modified Rose's phone."

"It's going to be hard acting surprised when all the innovations we've seen come along," Barbara observed.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe we'll invent a few."

The Doctor shot Ian a sharp look. Ian looked innocently back.

"Don't worry, I'll cut you in."

Barbara frowned as she realized another implication in Rose's speech.

"Does your mother know about you travelling with the Doctor?"

Rose nodded. "We visit ever so often. Not as often as she'd like, though."

Anticipating the questions, the Doctor answered before anyone had a chance to ask them.

"One, I didn't kidnap Rose's mother because…because she's Jackie," he shuddered. "And two, I knew Rose centuries after you two. My TARDIS driving skills have improved somewhat." It didn't help.

"What…he kidnapped you?" Rose exclaimed.

"Yes, those two nosy parkers over there followed Susan home and forced their way into my TARDIS."

"I thought the universe needed saving!" Sarah shouted down everyone else.

"Susan?" Rose asked, in the ensuing silence.

The Doctor suddenly looked every one of his years.

"Sarah's right. Now those devices will transport you when you twist the dial. Don't interfere with the events. Whatever happens, don't interfere; just observe. I'll be in the TARDIS monitoring the feedback the devices give. The devices will bring you back here once you're done. Then we can see what the problem is."

Barbara was the last to go.

"Doctor, how is Susan?"

"Just go, Barbara."

She went. She'd remember Susan as she last saw her on the scanner; distraught at being left behind by her grandfather, but with a future with David in front of her.


	5. Not So Simple

Disclaimer: The BBC owned Doctor Who decades before I was born. I don't think they're going to be giving it to me any time soon and until they do, I make no money from writing this.

"Rose?" The Tenth Doctor ran to the corner and looked around it. There was a distinct absence of Rose. He turned on his heel and scanned the street for a blonde girl. A specific one. There were several young blonde girls, but he couldn't see Rose. He'd known she wasn't there before he started looking. He'd seen her vanish right in front of him. He'd felt the disturbance. She'd been snatched away from him. Something or someone had taken Rose. And whatever had taken her wanted her, not him.

"I'm sorry, we're a package deal," the Doctor muttered to himself as he strode through the busy streets towards the spot where they had left the TARDIS.

He stopped in the middle of the street; a figure of stillness alien to the busy humans as they hurried on with their lives.

Rose had chased after Sarah. She had seen a man with curly blond hair and awful dress sense. A woman in an orange cardigan. His sixth incarnation and Evelyn. Anything that mixed his timelines up was bound to be trouble and would resonate through his history and possibly into his future. He traced his way back through his memories, looking for anything _wrong. _

He had no difficulty in remembering anything; he could feel the minds of his previous incarnations living through those experiences. A man was the sum of his memories; a Time Lord even more so. He had blocked them out in his ninth incarnation, but it only made the silence more painful. Ahead of him were only shadows; he had not lived those lives yet. Perhaps someone he had not yet become, a Doctor minus one, had watched him tonight.

Mel was making her _n_th attempt at persuading his sixth incarnation to exercise more; he was thinking wistfully of Evelyn's chocolate cake.

He was pretending he hadn't seen Evelyn suddenly scrabble in her handbag for her pills.

Evelyn was admiring his new costume.

He was tracking down a vital temporal nexus point in Earth's history- nothing wrong there. His past was happening as it should. He looked to a point further back.

Another call from Gallifrey. Last time, he had lost Sarah. This time, he would lose Romana- no, earlier than that.

They were calling him back. He would have to leave Sarah.

He was offering her a jelly baby; the first time he had done so.

Apparently, several scientists had disappeared from a top-secret complex- nothing was wrong there either.

He quickly skimmed through the memories of his earlier incarnations. Everything seemed to be fine. He was just allowing himself to feel relieved; to fool himself into believing that this incident hadn't wound the fourth dimension into knots, when he found a jarring note in a time a few scant years after he had escaped Gallifrey.

xxx

A girl helped her up.

"Are you all right?"

Rose shook her head, trying to clear her head.

"I'll get someone."

"No, it's fine. I'm fine. Honestly." Rose attempted a reassuring smile.

The girl didn't look convinced. "Who are you visiting? I'm visiting my mother. Have you been looking after yourself? You know, some people here simply refuse to leave the bedside. They just make themselves ill as well. Come on, maybe you'll feel better after you've eaten." Somehow, she had said it all in a single breath.

She seized Rose's hand. The sudden urgent beeping of the nexus point locator startled Rose out of her daze. She snatched her hand back. The girl didn't seem to mind.

"What's that?"

Rose silently cursed the Doctor's apparent inability to make unobtrusive gadgets.

"It's my watch. I think it's a little faulty. It often does that; it's nothing to worry about."

"More than a little, I think." She peered closely at it. "Is it meant to be showing that?"

Rose looked. The screen that was supposed to display the time and place was instead displaying columns of scrolling figures and formulae.

"Like I said, it's nothing to worry about." She pulled her sleeve down over it, hoping the girl wouldn't carry on asking questions about it. She seemed the inquisitive type.

To her surprise, she didn't. "Come on then, this place does excellent chips. Who did you say you were visiting, by the way?"

Rose looked around her. A crowded hospital canteen; so crowded that her materialisation hadn't been noticeable. Why was it so crowded?

"Um, my mother," she lied quickly.

"Older women do seem to be more susceptible to it, don't they?"

To what? Obviously, to ask would be to mark her as an outsider.

The queue moved forward and the locator began to beep once again, very softly, but increasing in volume as they moved towards the serving area.

Rose ducked out of the line, all too aware of the attention she was receiving.

"I'll go and get a table."

The girl smiled and gestured towards a table near the back of the canteen, where a couple were just vacating their seats.

"Better hurry."

Rose hurried. Slumping in her chair, she groaned inwardly, not wanting to attract any more looks. She was quite certain she had crossed the line from observing to interference. But this was crazy. She was in a hospital canteen, a hospital canteen that was mysteriously full due to some kind of illness striking older women in particular. It looked around her time, and therefore might be on Earth. All the locator was doing for her was attracting curiosity; she hoped the information it was gathering was useful to the Doctor. And how was she supposed to know when to move on?

"Penny for them?"

Rose opened her eyes and found the girl smiling down at her.

"My thoughts are sold at a premium rate," Rose replied.

"Fair point. Will a plate of chips suffice?" She placed two platefuls of chips on the table.

Rose laughed. "I was brought up not to speak with my mouth full." She suddenly realised how hungry she was. They'd been on their way for something to eat when she got involved in this.

She'd eaten nearly half the plate before she realised something. "Do you know, I still don't know your name?"

"I don't know yours. I'd say that makes us quits."

"I'm Rose."

"I'm-"

Something rippled. The world changed.

Rose stared around the canteen in shock. It had emptied instantly. There were only a few isolated individuals dotted around at the various tables.

She caught one of them by the arm as they walked past.

"Excuse me, but where has everyone gone?"

"Everyone? I don't know what you mean."

"There was a girl sitting opposite me; about my age, she had…" Rose trailed off, struck with the realisation that she had no memory of what the girl had looked like.

"I think you should get some rest, young lady. Can you get home alright?" The old woman patted her arm.

"Yes, yes, don't worry, I'm fine."

Rose registered two things as she laid her head upon her arms, hoping to calm her thoughts. First, the locator was now functioning properly and informed her that she was in London, 2005. Secondly, both plates of chips had taken part in the mass disappearance.

xxx

Rose was the first one to encounter a disturbance. She should have been in the era of American history known as the "Wild West". The Fourteenth Doctor frowned as he flicked through the different frequencies the locators responded to. It made no difference. Rose's locator was only registering the equivalent of gobbledegook. The others had the same problem. How was he supposed to work out how to fix the problems when he had no idea what the problems were? A quarter of the screen suddenly cleared and informed him that Rose was in London, England, Earth, 2005. The others followed suit. They were scattered across time and space but none of them were where they were supposed to be. They had all, somehow, ignored the programming of their locators. They were adrift in time and space without an anchor.

An unforeseen consequence of travelling through an unstable universe.


	6. The Trouble With Time

Disclaimer: I have absolutely no claim to the ownership of Doctor Who and I make absolutely no money out of using BBC's characters.

A/N: This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother.

_Always wandering off. This might be London, but that doesn't mean it's safe._

He was worried. Worried for them, and worried that they might choose to leave him here. He could see it underneath the irritation; he had been him, after all.

_Susan… _

The Tenth Doctor threw his mental barriers up. So, they, whoever they were, had taken Ian and Barbara, after he had left Susan behind but before they had found Vicki.

Rose and Ian and Barbara. Why?

xxx

Sarah materialised a split second before someone rounded the corner and ran into her.

"Oof." Sarah clutched at the small girl.

"I'm sorry!" The girl exclaimed, her voice muffled by Sarah's body.

"It's alright," Sarah recovered herself and released the girl.

"I'm sorry, Mummy always says…" The girl trailed off, staring up into Sarah's face. "Mummy?"

"Lauren!" The voice that called was all too familiar to Sarah.

Sarah didn't touch the dial, which was beeping softly to itself. But she vanished a split second before Sarah came around the corner.

She noticed the blonde woman before anything else. The blonde woman was engaged in reading and didn't seem to notice her arrival. Sarah entertained the idea that she might be able to hide and stage a more orthodox arrival, which was quickly dismissed.

xxx

"What are you doing here?" The woman spoke without looking up.

"The Doctor sent me." Sarah had no idea why she was telling her this; why she trusted her.

At this, the woman looked up. Her face should have been pretty, it must have been when she smiled, but something had left shadows in her eyes. It was a look Sarah recognised; it was the one she saw every time she looked into the mirror.

"He took you home. You shouldn't be here."

Sarah agreed. She didn't know where she should be, although home with Luke and Maria sounded a good idea, but she knew that she shouldn't be there, facing this woman who had the same look about her as the Doctor's other companions but suddenly looked a lot more like the Doctor.

"Are you ready yet?" Sarah asked. "Leela-"

The blow stung.

"Romana!"

"No," Romana said. "You are not that Sarah. Who are you?"

Her breath ghosted across Sarah's cheek as she fought against conflicting memories.

**_Aberdeen_****_… _**

_Gallifrey… _

**_Harry Sullivan drove her back to Croydon… _**

_She was lucky to survive with her memory intact… _

**_Nat, Josh… _**

_Leela, Romana… _

**_She adopted the archetype and called him Luke… _**

_She served the President: President Romana with her alien bodyguards Sarah and Leela… _

**_The Fourteenth Doctor…_**

"Sarah Jane Smith."

"Who am I?" The strange blonde woman looked into Sarah's eyes and found a stranger.

Sarah shook her head wordlessly.

"Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith." It was a dismissal.

Sarah twisted the dial and then she was gone, leaving only a lingering trace of temporal pollution.

Somewhere, someone was singing.

xxx

Her friend screamed as the teenage girl was thrown into the air by the car. The car of a different design to the few others; the car which had just appeared out of thin air.

Barbara stared.

The girl hit the ground and the spell was broken.

The crowd let her through.

"Do you know her? Is she your sister? Where did that car come from? I reckon it was foreign." The noise of the crowd washed over her as she fell to her knees beside her younger self.

There was a glimmer of recognition in the girl's eyes before they closed.

xxx

"It's not very nice seeing yourself killed, is it?" Barbara murmured to herself.

The brick wall was cold and shadowed; the summer sunshine hadn't reached it. The cold soaking through her cardigan was simply a sensation that proved to her that, as far she was concerned, she was still alive. She still existed. For now, at any rate. When the universe caught up with events, however…

An image of Ian's bloody body sprawled awkwardly across a trolley came to the forefront of her mind. She shook her head to dismiss the memory. This was a different thing entirely.

She'd given her mother's address to the ambulance men and run. She couldn't meet her. No doubt the police would want statements, but there were plenty of witnesses willing to say that a foreign car seemed to appear out of thin air and hit the girl before disappearing again. She doubted they would be interested in a woman claiming to be a temporal anomaly who said that she'd been killed by a car from the nineties which had slipped back in time to the fifties. She hoped that the driver had got home.

The travel device continued its persistent beeping. She slapped at it.

"I _know _something's wrong!"

Her surroundings blurred.

_Temporally unstable_. The phrase just brushed past her mind before the universe seemed to implode inside her head.

xxx

Ian was hiding from himself. And Barbara. And Alice and Katherine and Michael and David and Jackie. And every other person in Coal Hill School.

He cursed himself for not noticing until it was too late. And the Fourteenth Doctor, who apparently made devices with faulty clasps. And the Doctor they knew, for kidnapping them in the first place.

However, nothing was going to change the fact that it was break time; the staff room was full; he was squashed into a cupboard as cramped as a Dalek's casing and his travel device was lying on the floor out there, in full view of everyone. It could so easily be stepped on. There might be a rare lull in the conversations and someone might hear the insistent beeping of the device. That someone could so easily pick it up and end up anywhere.

Quite apart from changing history, which the Doctor still maintained was impossible, he would be stranded. He would have laughed at the thought if he wasn't trying to keep quiet. Stranded at home; in the very place they'd spent over a year trying to get back to. He didn't fancy the idea of trying to live a life with only the clothes on his back and a small bit of decimal currency, though. A life without-

_"It's never going to be alright. She's never coming back to us." _

Ian toppled from the cupboard as his mind flooded with thoughts and memories alien to him.

_He applied for the job at Reigate, got an interview, and won the job. He was happy in his work- _

And never went near Coal Hill School, he thought, stretching out for the device. Never knew Barbara Wright, never wondered about Susan Foreman, and never went along to the junkyard. He didn't really envy himself that existence.

_He died in his own arms, her name on his lips. _

He caught sight of his own shocked face just as his outstretched hand found the device. Someone dropped a newspaper. The date seemed to burn itself on his retinas as he fell through time and space.

3rd March 1964. Why were they still there?

xxx

_Rose waved goodbye at the school gates to her parents- _no

_Rose waved goodbye at the school gates to her children- _no

_Rose dumped another portion of chips on another plate for yet another visitor- _no

Rose staggered through the corridors of the hospital, barely aware of her surroundings, as what her life could have been was played out in her mind again and again. There were infinite possibilities; it wouldn't stop. It wouldn't ever stop.

As she welcomed the silence of unconsciousness, it occurred to her that at least the Fourteenth Doctor had sent her to the right place to collapse in.

xxx

_She was seven years old and listening to the radio with Aunt Lavinia, waiting for her parents to come home. There was a knock on the door and then they were back. _

Sarah fought away the memory of the fantasy. She'd been through it so many times before. She'd been convinced that she would soon wake up and find herself back there and that, this time, the knock on the door would be heralding her parents' safe return, rather than being the harbinger of doom.

_Three old companions; the Doctor was so proud of them… _

"No." Sarah concentrated on her history; who she was.

Sometimes willpower isn't enough.

_They first met on an item about the proposed abolishment of the 11+ plus exam… _

xxx

It was so loud.

_Something hit her with massive force, throwing her up into the air as if she was no heavier than a rag doll. _

_The army lorry suddenly loomed out of the fog and Susan screamed… _

Barbara staggered backwards, suddenly missing the support of the brick wall.

_Ptolemy laughed and kissed her and suddenly her forgotten past mattered much less… _

Universes collided and timelines collapsed into each other. She fell to the floor and screamed as her mind was torn apart.

_The Doctor stood over her and sighed sadly. _

_"The strong fall first," he muttered. "Always the strong." _

xxx

Trapped, unable to help them, the Fourteenth Doctor watched the dance of the data output. The displays had cleared for a while, but then reverted to indecipherable gobbledegook. One by one the displays died as the devices overloaded.

"Enough!" he cried eventually, slamming his hand down on the button and closing the link off. What had happened to them? He had pulled them from their timelines; he had been responsible for them, and he had let them down. Like so many others.

"Yes," the voice that spoke behind him was cold and controlled, "I quite agree."


End file.
